- Early vacuum cleaners were human powered, and somewhat awkward to use. They used bellows or a hand cranked belt like the "Whirlwind", invented in Chicago by Ives McGaffey. Some took two people to operate them.
- Around the turn of the century, powered vacuum cleaners first made an appearance, on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1898 John S. Thurman of St. Louis, Missouri submitted a patent for a "pneumatic carpet renovator" powered by an internal combustion engine, while in the UK in 1901 engineer Hubert Cecil Booth came up with a similar idea. Both their contraptions were so big that people didn't have them at home - they were part of a home cleaning service where the vacuum cleaner was towed on a Horse drawn cart from house to house. Cleaning was done by putting tubes through windows into the buildings. Booth's was nicknamed "Puffing Billy". Puffing Billy was hired to clean Westminster Abbey before and after King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra’s coronations.
- Portable vacuums first appeared in 1905, the first being invented by Walter Griffiths, a manufacturer in Birmingham, England. It was portable, easy to store, and powered by "any one person (such as the ordinary domestic servant)". In the early 20th century, society ladies used to throw 'vacuum cleaner parties'.
- In 1907 a department store janitor named James Murray Spangler of Canton, Ohio invented the first portable electric vacuum cleaner. His device was made out of a soap box and a pillow case, and used a rotating brush to loosen the dirt. However, he couldn't afford to produce it, so he sold the patent to a leather goods manufacturer called William Henry Hoover. He redesigned it and added attachments. The first vacuum cleaner he sold was the Model O, which would have set you back $60. In the UK and Ireland, cleaning a carpet with a vacuum cleaner is still called "hoovering" even if the device isn't made by Hoover at all. It occurs to me that if James Spangler had been a little richer we might all be "spangling" our houses instead!
- Technology marches on, and many improvements and variations have been made to vacuum cleaners since then. There have been models which float on air like a hovercraft. Now you can get cyclonic cleaners (pioneered by Dyson), hand held rechargeable ones for small spills and robot vacuum cleaners. The first of these was called a Trilobite after an extinct arthropod that moved along the ocean’s floor sucking up its food. It had the advantage of being able to tell you when it's bin was full, and attach itself to a charging station when it ran low on power. However, its safety feature, that it would always stay at least an inch away from any object, meant it never cleaned the carpet completely.
- According to the Vacuum Cleaner Manufactures Association, 98% of households have a vacuum cleaner. At least, they do in the Western world. In other countries, wall to wall carpeting isn't as common. People have wood or tile floors which can be easily swept or mopped.
- It was vacuum cleaner technology that inspired the hooded hairdryer in the 1920s. So you could say your vacuum and your hairdryer are cousins!
- The biggest vacuum cleaners are trucks which do the unenviable job of emptying septic tanks and cess pits and carting the sewage away to be disposed of. They are sometimes referred to as sucker trucks, sewer suckers or honeywagons. Similar vehicles are used at oil and gas drilling sites to mop up any spillages and debris from the drill site.
- In Denver, it is illegal to lend your vacuum cleaner to a neighbour.
- James Dyson built 5,000 prototypes before perfecting his Dual Cyclone machine, which, once he'd perfected it, gained him 29% of the vacuum cleaner market by volume and 52% by value in 2001. This was despite earlier criticisms that its selling price of £200, twice the price of most existing models, would put people off.
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